Wali Ahmadi

Rawan Farhadi and J. R. Perry

the colloquial Persian spoken in the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, and its environs. It has been a common and prestigious vernacular for several centuries, since Kabul was long ruled by dynasts of Iran (the Safavids) or India (the Mughals) for whom Persian was the language of culture and administration.

Xavier de Planhol

Before the period of war and unrest in Afghanistan that started in 1978, almost all the functions concerned with governing the country and directing its international relations were concentrated in Kabul. This primacy among Afghan cities is due to an exceptionally favorable geographical site.

Wali Ahmadi

Carla Grissmann

popular name of the National Museum of Afghanistan. A modest collection of artifacts and manuscripts already existed in the time of King Ḥabib-Allāh (r. 1901–19). In 1931 the collection was finally installed in a building in rural Darulaman (Dār-al-amān), eight kilometers south of Kabul City.

Detlef Haberland

William W. Malandra

Boris Litvinsky

(Kāfer Qalʿa), ancient settlement and one of the largest archeological monuments of the Vakhsh river valley, on the western outskirts of Kolkhozabad, Tajikistan. The city (šahrestān) together with the citadel form a square, each side 360 m long, oriented approximately to the cardinal points.

Habib Borjian

Habib Borjian

The Caspian vernaculars spoken in Kalārestāq, together with those of Tonekābon district, may not be properly classified as either Māzandarāni or Gilaki but serve as a transition between these two language groups.

Xavier de Planhol

Several references to kalāt in the tragic episode of the young Forud in Ferdowsi’s Šāh-nāma are thought to refer to this. Its earliest mention in historical accounts comes from the Mongol period, when the fourth Il-khan of Iran, Arḡun Khan built a defensive work at the south approach that still bears his name (“Gate of Arḡun”).

Hamid Algar

E. Naḵjavāni

Persian violinist and songwriter (1919-1990). As a violinist, Ḵāledi was known for his command of traditional Persian music and its innovative interpretation. As a composer, he was admired for the range of his rhythmically varied and elegiac songs.

Mina Yazdani

(1890-1963), a contemporary Iraqi-Iranian reformist cleric and political activist in anti-British protests and proponent of political power for the Shiʿite jurists in 20th-century Iran, who probably influenced Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers.

Nasrollah Pourjavady

Multiple Authors

a collection of didactic animal fables, with the jackals Kalila and Demna as two of the principal characters. The story cycle originated in India between 500 BCE and 100 BC, and circulated widely in the Near East.

Ḥasan Mirʿābedini

Wali Ahmadi

Ḵalili was born to Moḥammad Ḥosayn Khan Ḵalili, a state treasurer affiliated with the court of Amir Ḥabib-Allāh Khan. He was greatly interested in scholarship, an interest which he inculcated in his son. Upon the murder of the Amir on 19 February 1919, Mostawfi-al-Mamālek was arrested and swiftly executed.

Daniela Meneghini

Amnon Netzer

the word used to refer to the Jews of Iran in modern Persian usage. The word “kalimi” derives from the Arabic root KLM meaning to address, to speak, but the appellation in this context is derived directly from the specific epithet given to the prophet Moses as Kalim-Allāh.

Stefano Pello

Hushang Ettehad and EIr

Ḵalḵāli remained, to the end of his life, a loyal member of the democratic current and a close confidant of Sayyed Ḥasan Taqizādeh, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (Ferqa-ye ejtemāʿiyun-e ʿāmmiyun) in the First Majles (1906-08), and later of Iran’s Democrat Party (Ferqa-ye demokrāt-e Irān) in the Second Majles.

Willem Floor

(or ḵāl kubidan, kabud zadan “tattooing”), that is, making a permanent mark on the skin by inserting a pigment, is one of the oldest methods of body ornamentation. The earliest evidence of tattoos in the Iranian culture area is the almost completely tattooed body of a Scythian chief in Pazyryk Mound

Pierre Oberling

TADAHIKO OHTSU

Almost all the objects excavated by Hakemi are now kept in Iran National Museum (Tehran). They are exhibited and open to the public. Since they had been archeologically reported only with photographs, in 2005 Japan-Iran joint researchers carried out new archeological studies for about 50 objects from the Kaluraz site.

Paul Losensky

T. Yazici

(1468-1534), prolific Ottoman scholar, author of several works in and on Persian. A native of Edirne, he studied under the local mufti, Mollā Loṭfi, and subsequently taught at the madrasas of Edirne, Uskup (Skoplje) and Istanbul.

Colin Paul Mitchell

A. Ashraf with Layla Diba

(ca. 1859–1940), Iranian painter of the European academic style during the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods. He descended from a family that had produced a number of artists since the Afsharid period.

Nasrollah Pourjavady

Stephen Blum

The kamānča has a spherical sound cavity of mulberry or walnut wood, covered with sheepskin. Most instruments have four steel strings and are played with a horsehair bow. As the name of the Iraqi joza suggests, its sound cavity is made of coconut, covered with sheepskin or fish skin.

Christine Nöelle-Karimi

Sunil Sharma

In his Haft eqlim, Aḥmad Amin-Rāzi devotes a long section to Kāmrān Mirzā in which he extols the prince’s bravery, generosity, and piety. The historian Badāʾuni also praises him as a courageous and learned man, renowned as a poet, but who was led to ruin by excessive drinking, while Abu’l-Fażl portrays him as a treacherous ingrate.

Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Parwin Mahmoudweyssi

SOHEILA SAREMI

Ḵāna-ye Edrisihā is told from the alternating perspectives of four people: Mrs. Edrisi, symbol of a lost aristocracy; her daughter Laqā, trapped in a tangled web of old beliefs, traditions, and customs; her intellectual grandson Vahhāb, living a miserable life in an ocean of books; and Yāvar, the faithful servant, living in past memories.

Bahram Grami

(Hibiscus cannabinus L.), an annual herbaceous plant of the Malvaceae family, yielding a soft fiber from the stem bark. Its fiber is used primarily for making gunnysacks and burlap. The first gunny mill (guni bāfi) in Persia was established in 1933 in Rašt by the private sector.

Gerhard Böwering and Matthew Melvin-Koushki

an Islamic institution and physical establishment, principally reserved for Sufi dervishes to meet, reside, study, and assemble and pray together as a group in the presence of a Sufi master (Arabic, šayḵ, Persian, pir), who is teacher, educator, and leader of the group.

Multiple Authors

the second most important city in the country and the capital of Kandahar province. This entry is divided into seven parts: i. Historical geography to 1979. ii. Pre-Islamic monuments and remains. iii. Early Islamic period. iv. From the Mongol invasion through the Safavid era. v. In the 19th century. vi. 20th century, 1901-73. vii. From 1973 to the present.

Xavier de Planhol

The oasis clearly was destined to give rise to a major city that would control these rich lands with their grain fields, orchards, and gardens and manage the irrigation system they required. This urban center was situated near the top of the alluvial cone, where the Arḡandāb river runs from the mountains.

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

M. Jamil Hanifi

city in southern Afghanistan (lat 31°36′28″ N, long 65°42′19″ E). Kandahar expanded substantially during the second half of the 20th century by attracting rural labor and by developing new residential quarters (šahr-e naw) and public buildings.

Michael G. Morony

Firoze M. Kotwal and Jamsheed K. Choksy

(1908-1988), Parsi scholar of Zoroastrianism and Iranian languages. He held the position of Secretary of the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute in Bombay for 15 years and edited its Journal. He served as Professor of Avestan Studies at the University of Bombay.

P. OBERLING

Wolfram Kleiss

town in eastern Kermanshah Province, on the modern road from Hamadan to Kermanshah, identical with a trace of the silk road. Isidorus of Charax (1st century CE) referred to it as Congobar and mentioned a temple of Anāhitā (Anaitis) there. The site has ruins of debated date and nature.

Pavel Lurje

(lit. “Fortress of Kang,”), a mythical, paradise-like fortress in Iranian folklore. There are different and often contradictory descriptions of Kang, Kangdež and several similar place names in Pahlavi literature and the epics of the Islamic period.

Hamid Algar

Shiʿi scholar whose power and prominence in the affairs of Tehran for more than four decades earned him the semi-official title of raʾis al-mojtahedin (“chief of the mojtaheds”), as well as accusations of inordinate greed.

Fereydoun Moezi Moghadam

Shirvanlu, rightly convinced that the few already known children’s writers were not the sole answer to Kanun’s children’s book project, approached many writers of adult literature—novelists, translators, dramatists, essayists in social sciences, and scholars in humanities—and invited them to try their hand in this new field.

Fereydoun Moezi Moghadam

Kanun productions were the first experience of film direction for a number of today’s best-known Iranian directors. All internationally recognized Iranian animation film directors started their work at Kanun, and many have continued to cooperate with it.

Anna Livia Beelaert

Anna Livia Beelaert

a major Persian poet and prose writer (b. Šervān, ca. 521/1127; d. Tabriz, between 582/1186-87 and 595/1199). Ḵāqāni’s fame rests on his qaṣidas, of which, in Żiāʾ-al-Din Sajjādi’s edition, there are one hundred and thirty-two.

Toshio Hayashi, Y. Yoshida

Toshio Hayashi

archeological site of a capital of the Uighur Khaghanate (second half of the 8th century to first half of the 9th century). Karabalgasun is located in the Orkhon valley, 320 km west of Ulan Bator (Ulaanbaatar), 30 km north of Karakorum.

Y. Yoshida

The trilingual inscription at Karabalgasun, in Old Turkic, Sogdian, and Chinese, of the eighth Uighur qaghan in Mongolia commemorates the qaghan’s (Old Turkic ḵaḡan, qaḡan) own military achievements and those of his predecessors.

Hubertus von Gall

an ensemble of artificially cut rock chambers dated to the 4th or 3rd century BCE, in Kordestān Province, 20 km west of Takab. The site is of considerable importance because of its Greek inscription, one of the very few examples preserved in situ in Persia.

Cross-Reference

Meir Litvak

a city in Iraq, situated about 90 km southwest of Baghdad. It is one of the four Shiʿite shrine cities (with Najaf, Kāẓemayn, and Sāmarrāʾ) in Iraq known in Shʿite Islam as ʿatabāt-e ʿaliāt or ʿatabāt-e moqaddasa.

Cross-Reference

Forogh Hashabeiky and Behrooz Sheyda

(1953-2012), Iranist, fiction writer, and journalist. Kargar’s later works of fiction, written in Sweden, participate in the more modern spectrum of writing in the twentieth century and are characterized by his experimentations with disrupted chronology, non-linear plots, and interrupted language reminiscent of stream of consciousness.

Morteza Nouraei

a term used from the early 19th century until the abolishment of capitulation (kāpitulāsion) in 1927 to refer specifically to an agent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who was charged with regulating relations between Iranian subjects and foreigners.

Keith Hitchins

John R. Perry

(ca. 1705-1779), “The Wakil,” ruler of Persia (except Khorasan) from Shiraz during 1751-79. The Zand were a pastoral tribe of the Lak branch of the northern Lors, ranging between the inner Zagros and the Hamadān plains, centered on the villages of Pari and Kamāzān in the vicinity of Malāyer.

Xavier de Planhol

Xavier de Planhol

The technology of kārēz exploits a difference in grade between a tunnel and the groundwater table, so it ends at an elevation higher than that of the water table. In Iran the average grade may be around 0.5 percent.

Xavier de Planhol

The major significance of the kārēz lies in its continuous discharge throughout the year. In contrast, irrigation systems that rely on surface water runoff can completely cease to discharge water during the dry season.

Xavier de Planhol

In 1990 it was estimated that the kārēz technique supplied water to around 1.5 million hectares of the planet’s total irrigated surface area, which constituted only the minor portion of approximately 0.6 percent.

Eckart Ehlers

Stephen Blum

designation of three types of musical instrument, the most prestigious being long trumpets made of brass, gold, silver, or other metals. Two regional instruments of Iran are also called karnā. Like the metal karnā, the long reed trumpet of Gilān and Māzandarān lacks fingerholes.

George Sanikidze

Habib Borjian

the largest river and the only navigable waterway in Iran. It rises in the Baḵtiāri Zagros mountains west of Isfahan, flows out of the central Zagros range, traverses the Khuzestan plain, and joins the Shatt al-Arab.

Shabaz Shahnavaz

With the intensification of the Anglo-Russian rivalry in the late 1800s over Iran’s geopolitical position and commercial resources, Great Britain began to exert immense pressure on the shah’s government to provide it with access to the Karun trade route.

Mangol Bayat

Ali Rahnema

(1877-1962), the leading political cleric during the critical period of 1941-53. Until the departure of Reza Shah in 1941, Kāšāni stayed on the sidelines of domestic Iranian politics. Mohammad Reza Shah ascended to his father’s throne on 16 September.

Multiple Authors

Habibollah Zanjani and EIr.

Kashan is poor in flora and fauna. The most typical plants are bushes and shrubs spreading over the steppes, but the landscape becomes richer with increased elevation; Characteristic trees are pine, cypress, black poplar, elm, and ash.

Xavier de Planhol

To the northeast of the well-watered mountain ranges of western and southern Iran, a line of bountiful oases which have given rise to important urban areas stretches along the piedmont bordering the desert basins of central and southeastern Iran.

Mehrdad Amanat

Habibollah Zanjani

In line with the general trends in Iran’s demography, the urban population in Kashan has continued to increase, while the rural population has steadily decreased. Such trends have been more significantly felt in Kashan Sub-province than the rest of the country.

Mohammad- Reza Haeri and EIr.

In line with the trend towards modernization in Iran’s recent history, most residential houses built by the middle classes in Kashan since 1950 comprise all or some of the following units: entrance, courtyard, living room, reception room, kitchen, lavatory, bath, bedroom, storage, staircase, and hall.

EIr.

The design and major components of the historic mansions follow the general pattern of traditional architecture, but with larger spaces and more detailed architectural craftsmanship and luxurious elements.

Habib Borjian

Margaret S. Graves

Kashan, with its high-quality ceramic production in the medieval period, appears to have been a major site for the manufacture of fine wares between the 1170s and 1220s as well as later 13th and early 14th centuries.

Siegfried Weber

Persian was the basis of administrations all over western Asia and the highly prestigious language at the courts. Hence, Persian learning radiated into Kashmir and found a fertile soil after the initial impulse.

Siegfried Weber

Omkar N. Koul

Kashmir may have had cultural and trade relations with Persia from ancient times, but the influence of Persian language and culture did not dominate until the introduction of Islam during the 14th century.

Pending

Devin J. Stewart

the title of a large literary anthology compiled by Shaikh Bahāʾ-al-Din Moḥammad ʿĀmeli, commonly known as Shaikh Bahāʾi, the gifted polymath and leading jurist of the Safavid empire during most of the reign of Shah ʿAbbās I (r. 1587-1629).

Hušang Ettehād

Kāmyār ʿĀbedi

While still in high school, Kasra’i made friends with such political figures as Moḥsen Pezeškpur and Dāriuš Foruhar, and was influenced by their nationalistic sentiments. As a college student, however, he became enthralled by the ideals of a just and classless society based on Marxist doctrines, and became a loyal member of the Tudeh Party.

Ali Reżā Manafzadeh

Moḥammad Amini

The surge in activities of Islamic groups and the intensification of the rhetoric of mullahs at mosques coincided with the escalation and sharpening of Kasravi’s criticism of the foundation of Shiʿite concepts and values.

Pending

Mohammad Amini

Kasravi founded the “Society of Free Men” (Bāhamād-e āzādegān), announced his call for pākdini (pure faith)—born out of his sense of prophetic mission—and became the most outspoken intellectual against religious superstition and illusion.

Cross-Reference

Willem Floor

The so-called ḵāleṣa or public crown lands (confiscated or abandoned land) was part of the ḵāṣṣa holdings, and often the dividing line between the two was blurred. Both stood in contrast to amlāk-e divāni or mamālek, which referred to state lands. During the 18th century the term ḵāṣṣa, as well as divāni and mamālek, fell into disuse.

cross-reference

Mahmud Omidsalar

Iraj Afšār

In this period, Germany, with no apparent interests in Iran, was favored by nationalist Iranians, who believed that it was the one that could free Iran from the political and economic domination of Great Britain and Russia. The name of the paper recalled Kāva, the legendary hero who rose against Żaḥḥāk, the bloodthirsty tyrant.

Nikolaus Schindel

Nikolaus Schindel

Since the reign of Jāmāsp interrupts the two regnal periods of Kawād I, and because of marked differences between the two, they should be treated separately. Kawād employs only one obverse and one reverse type during his first reign. The obverse shows the king’s bust to the right wearing a crown consisting of a crescent and two mural elements.

Prods Oktor Skjærvø

Prods Oktor Skjærvø

Kauui Kauuāta has no epithets in the Avesta to describe him, and the descriptions in the Pahlavi sources are mostly vague. His seed is from the xwarrah; he was the first to establish kingship in Iran; he was godfearing and a good ruler. According to a notice in the Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr, he may have married Wan, daughter of Gulaxš.

Prods Oktor Skjærvø

The Avesta contains no information on Aipi.vahu, Aršan, Pisinah, and Biiaršan, but, according to the Pahlavi tradition, Abīweh was the son of Kawād and the father of Arš, Biyarš (spelled <byʾlš>), Pisīn, and Kāyus.

Prods Oktor Skjærvø

The story of Kay Us’s madness is found in two versions. According to the Bundahišn, his mind was disturbed so that he tried to go up and do battle with the sky, but he fell down and the xwarrah was stolen from him; he devastated the world with his army, until they caught and bound him by deception in the land of Šambarān.

Prods Oktor Skjærvø

In the Avesta, Vištāspa’s father is Auruuaṯ.aspa, who is mentioned only once, when Zarathustra asks Anāhitā for the ability to make Vištāspa, son of Auruuaṯ.aspa, help the daēnā along with thoughts, words, and deeds, a wish he is granted.

Prods Oktor Skjærvø

The name Vištāspa presumably means “he who gives the horses free rein” (víṣitāso áśvāḥ “horses let loose or given free rein”), which agrees with the description of Vištāspa as the prototypical winner of the chariot race in Yašt 5.132.

Prods Oktor Skjærvø

According to the Pahlavi texts, Kay Siāwaxš built the Kang castle (Kang-diz) by miraculous power (Pahlavi Rivāyat: with his own hands, by means of the [Kavian] xwarrah and the might of Ohrmazd and the Amahrspands).

Prods Oktor Skjærvø

The desire of the medieval historians to fit all the ancient narratives into one and the same chronological description of world history from the creation led them to coordinate the Biblical, Classical, and Iranian sources.

A. Panaino

Pahlavi form of the name of a mythical sea, Av. Kąsaoiia-, connected in tradition with the Hāmun lake. According to Later Av. sources it is from the Kąsaoiia that the Saošiiaṇt Astuuat̰.ərəta- will rise.

Sunil Sharma

EIr.

a leading daily newspaper published in Tehran from 1942 until the 1979 Revolution. Since then, it has been published under the patronage of the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. Kayhan of London was foundedin 1984 as a weekly newspaper; it has continued to be published as a monarchist newspaper for Iranians in Diaspora.

Cross-reference

Armin Eschraghi

(d. 1844), student and successor of Shaikh Aḥmad b. Zayn-al-Din Aḥsāʾi and head of the Šayḵi movement. The main sources for Rašti’s biography are some of his own works which contain autobiographical information.

Meir Litvak

Vida Nassehi-Behnam

(1924-1996), painter. He was part of a group of painters who started a modern movement in painting in Persia. They opened the first art gallery, Apādānā, in Tehran (1949) where they offered courses in painting and organized lectures and exhibitions. It became also a meeting place for artists and intellectuals.

Multiple Authors

Jean Calmard

Kazerun is located in the southwestern Zagros range, which is oriented northwest-southeast in the normal folding zone and is seismically active. Kazerun comprises contrasting climates; there is a cold zone in the mountainous north, with summits up to 3,000 m, and a warm zone in the south, with elevations less than 2,000 m.

ʿAlī Ašraf Ṣādeqī

Habib Borjian

Kāzeruni’s fortune was made through his investments in the textile industry, which had long been a major industry in Isfahan but had lost ground to British and Russian cotton imports. Kāzeruni stood out among the nationalist merchants and landowners who launched new campaigns to revive Isfahan’s cotton production and textile industry.

Hurivash Ahmadi Dastgerdi and EIr

Rüdiger Schmitt

American scholar of Indo-European studies, who specialized also in Old Persian studies. He went to Berlin and Munich universities to continue for two years his classical studies, including (apart from the languages) Greek epigraphy, history, and archeology.

Gen’ichi Tsuge

Alain Cariou

Because of the Chinese government program for urban development, Uighur neighborhoods are consistently demolished to make way for straight avenues and banal, modern buildings. Moreover, the Chinese government is promoting the migration of Han Chinese.

Xavier de Planhol and Bernard Hourcade

The Kerman basin, in which Kerman City is situated, is located at an elevation of about 1,700 m with land sloping very gently from northwest to southeast. It is entirely surrounded by a series of high massifs.

Ḥabib-Allāh Zanjāni and Moḥammad-Ḥosayn Nejātiān

In 1956, the total population of the province was around 789,000 persons (of whom, 127,624 then belonged to Bandar Abbas), while in the 2011 population and housing census, it had increased to nearly 2,939,000.

Rudi Matthee

James M. Gustafson

Between the fall of the Safavids and the rise of the Qajar dynasty(ca. 1722-94), Kerman maintained a measure of stability and security under local rulers despite the rise and fall of dynastic states across the Iranian plateau.

Janet Kestenberg Amighi

The main focus of this entry is on the nature of pressures exerted on the Zoroastrians of Yazd and Kerman to convert away from their religion, and the Zoroastrian responses of both conversion and persistence during the 19th century. It will cover four themes: Muslim treatment of Zoroastrians and pressures to convert, Zoroastrian modes of resistance and submission, the Parsi contribution to Zoroastrian revivalism, and a comparison of Zoroastrian responses to Muslim pressures to convert versus responses to Bahai forms of proselytization.

Nahid Pirnazar and EIr

In the late 18th century, according to the account of the Jewish community of Yazd compiled by Molla Aqābābā Damāvandi a century later, severe drought caused its members to move to Rafsanjān and Sirjān and the villages around Kerman. Thus the Jewish Quarter of nineteenth-century Kerman became mainly an offshoot of the community in Yazd.

James M. Gustafson

Since the late 19th century, Kerman’s hand-woven, knotted pile carpets are widely regarded as among the finest in the world by art historians and collectors for the quality of their materials and workmanship.

Habib Borjian

The province of Kerman is characterized by two indigenous languages, Persian in the mountainous north and Garmsiri in the lowland south, supplemented by the Median-type dialects spoken by the Zoroastrian, Jewish, and possibly Turkish residence of the city of Kerman.

Jean Calmard

The town and province of Kermanshah are located on the strategic travel route, later known as the “Khorasan Highway,” linking Mesopotamia to the Iranian plateau. This route was militarily and commercially important even in antiquity.

Habib Borjian

Kermanshah is linguistically characterized by a triad of Kurdish, Gurāni, and Persian within a multifaceted, areal-tribal-social setting; supplemented by Neo-Aramaic spoken in pockets by area Jewry, as well as an isolated Turkic dialect spoken in the Sonqor valley.

Kazuo Morimoto

Faquir M. Hunzai

a book by Ḥamid-al-Din Kermāni (d. after 411/1020), an Ismaʿili missionary, analyzing two other Ismaʿili texts, the Eṣlāḥ of Abu Ḥātem Rāzi (d. after 322/933-4) and the Noṣra of Abu Yaʿqub Sejestāni (d. after 360/970).

Sholeh Quinn and Stephen N. Lambden

Evelin Grassi

the National Library of Tajikistan. With its 28-stack rooms, the library has a capacity for ten million books. Manuscript holdings span seven centuries (13th-19th centuries) and include the works of outstanding Persian classical authors.

Anna Krasnowolska

Jamsheed Akrami

Khachikian’s first film was Bāzgašt (The Return), a romantic melodrama that pitted a hardworking village boy serving an affluent family in the city against the family’s spoiled son in a rivalry over a young woman. The mawkish story shared formula of Iranian films of the period, but was technically more polished and fast-paced.

Chapour Rassekh

Khademi joined the Air Force in 1938, and continued pilot training. He was the first Iranian to receive a commercial pilot license from the British Civil Aviation Authority in 1948, and in 1957 he completed a training course at the U.S. Air Force University in Montgomery, Alabama.

EIr

(1927-1986), Iranian translator and scholar of Persian and Arabic. His major publications range from translation of contemporary Arabic scholarship on Islamic philosophy to the critical edition of a number of major works in the fields of medieval philosophy and pre-modern history of Iran.

Étienne de la Vaissière

Khosrow Davami

poet, writer, editor and political activist. Khaksar had two eminent Persian poets, Maḥmud Mošref Tehrāni and Ḥassan Pastā, as his teachers in the last two years of high school. In 1959, his first poem was published in Omid-e Irān, a noted weekly journal published by Moḥammad Āṣemi in Tehran.

Cross-Reference

Lolita Nehru

in Surxondaryo prov., southern Uzbekistan, site of a settlement and palace of the nomad Yuezhi, with paintings and sculptures of the mid-1st century BCE. The Yuezhi, and perhaps other nomad groups, overthrew the Hellenistic Greek dynasty which had ruled there since the mid-3rd century as successor to the post-Achaemenid governments of Alexander and the Seleucids.

Alvand Bahari

(1922-2010), Persian logician and scholar and a permanent member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature; his works range from Manṭeq-e ṣuri to translations of Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories and a critical edition of Mollā Ṣadrā’s Iqāẓ-al-nāʾemin.

D.T. Potts

G. Mirfendereski

In the years following World War II, Kharg was sparsely populated and Ḵārgu was uninhabited. Its preeminence as Iran’s principal oil export terminal began in the early 1950s when the island was connected to the Gačsārān oilfield on the mainland by way of the coastal town of Ganāva.

Multiple Authors

William H. Martin and Sandra Mason

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam contain some of the best-known verses in the world. The book is also one of the most frequently and widely illustrated of all literary works. The stimulus to illustrate Khayyam’s Rubaiyat came initially from outside Persia, in response to translations in the West.

Mario Casari

The reception of Khayyam’s poetic work in Italy, as in the rest of Europe, was the result of the translation and rewriting of the English poet Edward FitzGerald (d. 1883) in the years 1859-79. In Italy the more scholarly approach to Khayyam’s work by a few dedicated Iranists proceeded at a fitful pace over many decades.

Jos Biegstraaten

Bijan Vahabzadeh

Three mathematical treatises of Omar Khayyam have come down to us: (1) a commentary on Euclid’s Elements; (2) an essay on the division of the quadrant of a circle; (3) a treatise on algebra; he also wrote (4) the treatise on the extraction of the nth root of the numbers, which is not extant.

Multiple Authors

Mohammad Hossein Nejatian

This article deals with the following population characteristics of Khorramabad: population growth from 1956 to 2011, age structure, average household size, literacy rate, and economic activity status.

Alain Cariou

Located between the Kunlun mountains and the edge of the Taklamakan desert, the city of Khotan is today a major administrative center of the Khotan Prefecture, a vast area mostly concentrated in the piedmont oasis.

Hiroshi Kumamoto

Mauro Maggi

the body of writings contained in a large number of manuscripts and manuscript folios and fragments written from the 5th to the 10th century in the Khotanese language, the Eastern Middle Iranian language of the Buddhist Saka kingdom of Khotan on the southern branch of the Silk Route (in the present-day Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China).

Clifford Edmund Bosworth

Habib Borjian

Kiā’s primary achievement was promotion and publicizing of a Persian national identity that embraced the pre-Islamic heritage—not atypical of his contemporaries who had received their formal education during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi. He taught and published, winning him reputation in society and eventually an appointment as the language academy’s president.

Antonio Invernizzi

Pierre Lory

“Alchemy.” Externally, the purpose of alchemy was the conversion of base metals like lead into silver or gold by means of long and complicated operations leading to the production of a mysterious substance, the ‘philosopher’s stone,’ able to operate the transmutation.

NASRIN RAHIMIEH & DANIEL RAFINEJAD

As Milani describes in his afterword to the English translation, Golshiri incrementally sent handwritten pages of the manuscript to Milani in California in the guise of personal letters, “to avoid the ever-watchful gaze of the Islamic censors.”

Edward Dąbrowa

Parthian kingship started with the Arsacids monarchy and was an original form of Oriental kingship. The royal ideology was created by combining elements of different provenance; Greek elements were systematically removed or relegated to be replaced by Iranian traditions.

Ahmad Aryavand and Bahram Grami

Michaela Zinko

Johann Kirste received his primary and secondary education in Graz, and after graduating from high school (Gymnasium) in 1870, he enrolled at the University of Graz to study Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit with Karl Schenkl. From 1872 until 1874, in the traditional manner of the time, Kirste studied at several German universities to broaden his training.

Hamid Algar

Hamid Algar

The crystallization of a given line of Sufi tradition as an “order” should not be understood as imposing on all the spiritual descendants of the eponym a definitive and permanently binding choice of methods and emphases.

Habib Borjian

(b. ca. 1870-75, d. 1945), Tajik folk poet and singer. His exceptional skill in singing the Guruḡli stories on the dotār (a long-neck lute) won him great reputation throughout Tajikistan. According to his biographer, his performance would take hours from evening to dawn, with only short breaks to relax and eat, for several nights in a row.

David Durand-Guédy

a prominent family of Šāfeʿi ulema, who were settled in Isfahan by the Saljuq grand vizier Neẓām-al-Molk.They turned into the most important family and political actor in that city during the Saljuq period and continued to play a significant role up to the Mongol invasion.

Habib Borjian

Two major languages of native Caspian and Kurdish dialects are spoken in Kojur. The Caspian dialect is structurally Mazandarani with some divergence. The Kurdish dialect is spoken by the Kurdish immigrants and remains unstudied.

C. Edmund Bosworth

Fridrik Thordarson

Konow was an all-around Indologist, whose extensive scholarly work covers most branches of Indian studies. His occupation with Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, where he edited half a dozen of volumes on various languages, resulted in a long series of studies of Tibeto-Burman, Munda and Dravidian languages.

Vahid Rafati

Rudi Matthee

Multiple Authors

also Göroḡly, name of an early-17th-century folk hero and poet, whose stories are mainly known among the Turkic peoples; passed into the folk literature of the Armenians, Georgians, Kurds and Bulghars, and the Iranian provinces of Azerbaijan and Khorasan.

Hasan Javadi

There are at least 17 versions of the Köroǧlu/Göroḡly tradition about a heroic bandit minstrel, but the Turkic versions of the story among the Azerbaijanis, the Turks of Anatolia, and the Turkmen, are most similar to each other regarding language and plot.

Ameneh Youssefzadeh

The traditional venues for the performance of the Köroǧlu/Goroḡli epic are life-cycle celebrations, private gatherings, and teahouses. In Azerbaijan and northern Khorasan, from the 17th century up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978, teahouses played a pivotal role in the diffusion and the preservation of the epic.

Maryam Nourzaei, Carina Jahani, and Erik Anonby

Koroshi can be described as a distinct subgroup within the Balochi macro-language, although it shares many features with southern dialects of Balochi. The Koroshi spoken in Fars Province (the ‘northern’ dialect) differs to some extent from varieties of the southern dialect.

Zeev Rubin

Nikolaus Schindel

The reign of Ḵosrow I (531-79) is generally regarded as the heyday of the Sasanian empire, but his coinage marks the nadir of Sasanian coin art. The most noteworthy features are innovations in reverse typology. In the first type, the assistant figures are shown frontally, a totally new depiction; and they hold what appears to be a spear.

James Howard-Johnston

the last great king of the Sasanian dynasty (590-628 CE). The principal extant history of the period, written in Armenia in the early 650s, was appropriately entitled The History of Khosrow. He is rightly accorded a great deal of space in the Šāh-nāma of Ferdowsi.

Hirotake Maeda

C. Edmund Bosworth

the last sultan of the Ghaznavid dynasty, in northwestern India, essentially in the Panjab, with his capital at Lahore. Various honorifics are attributed to him in the historical sources, in the verses of poets eulogizing him, and in the legends of his coins in the collections of the British Museum and Lahore

C. Edmund Bosworth

Tahera Qutbuddin

(oration, speech, sermon), a formal public address performed in a broad range of contexts by Muslims across the globe, rooted in the extemporaneously composed discourses of pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia.

Meir Litvak

Etrat Elahi

popular Persian dish usually made of ground lamb or beef, and more recently, ground chicken or turkey in a mixture of herbs, spices, or other ingredients. There are two kinds of kufta: with rice and without.

Soroor Ghanimati

a well preserved archeological site of chiefly Sasanian date, in the delta of the Helmand River, in the Iranian province of Sistān, near Zābol. The sacred precinct is located on the monumental upper part of the site and has inevitably attracted most attention.

Pierre Oberling

Philip G. Kreyenbroek

Written, “elevated” poetry traditionally played a less prominent role in Kurdish society than folk poetry (q.v.) did. The number of written literary works in Kurdish is far smaller than in the surrounding cultures.

N. Sims-Williams and H. Falk

The inscriptions issued by the Kushan rulers or in areas under their rule include texts in Bactrian, written in Greek script, and in Prakrit written in Brāhmī or Kharoṣṭhī script. Naturally enough, the Bactrian inscriptions are mostly found in Bactria and the Indian inscriptions in the Kushan territories to the south and east of the Hindu Kush.

H. Falk

Dates in South Asia usually lack precision. Only in post-Kushan times do we meet with dates which are verifiably precise up to the day. The reason is that years can start in spring, the Indian way, or in the autumn, the Macedonian way. Years start with a certain month, but months can start with the full moon or with the new moon.

J. Pons

Jessie Pons

Artistic productions fall mainly into: works in the service of the dynasty and works in the service of religion—Buddhism, but also Brahmanism and Jainism. There exist few if any common features between statues of rulers from Khalchayan and a Buddhist relief from Gandhara.

Multiple Authors

Étienne de La Vaissière

The very first surely dated occurrence of the title Kushanshah seems to be in the Paikuli inscription of the Sasanian Narseh ca. 293 CE. It would show a reduction in status of the kings of the former Kushan territory from “king of kings” to “king,” itself linked with a Sasanian overlordship.